‘Notes to A Tribe Called Quest’ mixes autobiography...

2of4Author Hanif Abdurraqib will discuss and sign "Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest," at Brazos Bookstore on Thursday.Photo: Kate Sweeney

3of4Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of "Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest"Photo: Kate Sweeney

4of4Fans dance to A Tribe Called Quest at Lollapalooza.Photo: Alan Lessig

Hanif Abdurraquib was first drawn to A Tribe Called Quest as an adolescent in Columbus, Ohio. He could tell the members of the cerebral Queens hip-hop giants were a little off the beaten path, a little different from what the rest of the rap game was doing.

They felt like kindred spirits.

“When you’re young, it’s kind of easy to convince yourself that you’re an outsider,” says Abdurraquib, whose new book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, celebrates the group he loved above all. “There weren’t a lot of places where weirdness and cool intersected, and A Tribe Called Quest really did that for me. They gave me a kind of mirror I could see myself in and feel good about what was looking back at me.”

A poet as well as a critic, Abdurraquib originally set out the write a somewhat linear account tracing the group from its rise in the early ’90s to its acrimonious breakup in 1998. But a standard format didn’t conform to his sensibility, which mixes autobiography and cultural observations to convey Tribe’s importance to himself and to hip-hop.

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Hanif Abdurraquib discusses Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest 7 p.m. March 21 at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. For more information visit brazosbookstore.com.

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Abdurraquib ended up writing some chapters as missives to the individual members, Q-Tip, Phife and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. He riffs on the changing ways we consume music, from the challenges posed by cassette tapes (all that spooling and unspooling) to the ease of the streaming age. And he waxes poetic on the importance of having a crew.

“I hung with the kids who were not entirely uncool but who were also decidedly not the cool kids,” he writes. “There’s a lot of currency in the space between immensely cool and not at all cool. If they’re lucky, a crew can define coolness on their own terms, because in the larger ecosystem of popularity, they are often forgettable.”

Few groups defined coolness on their own terms quite like Tribe. Q-Tip forged new paths in the interpolation of jazz into hip-hop. Phife was the sports-obsessed punch line master whose dedication to the group was never as all-consuming as Q-Tip’s. Ali was the perfect sonic counterpart to Q-Tip. Together they made three of the greatest albums in hip-hop history: People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990), The Low End Theory (1991) and Midnight Marauders (1993). These works remain undisputed masterpieces of the genre.

If Abdurraquib stopped there, with his thoughts and feelings about Tribe, Go Ahead in the Rain would be a fine book. But he doesn’t. He goes deep into ’90s hip-hop, perhaps the genre’s most fertile era. He compares Tribe’s mastery of jazz samples to the haunting underground noise of the Wu-Tang Clan, and to the brutal collision of samples employed by the Bomb Squad production team on albums by Public Enemy and Ice Cube. He examines the effect of the lawsuits that made producers more hesitant to mine older music for samples. Go Ahead in the Rain packs a lot into its 206 pages.

“As I was writing I couldn’t help myself but to explore anything that resting beyond Tribe’s music, which is a lot” Abdurraquib says. “It felt unfair to me to only tell the story of the group and not the whole world they existed in.”